Stephen King sits at his desk tapping a Montblanc against a yellow legal pad. Tap, tap, tap, tap. Twilight Zone : Wild West, Twilight Zone : Wild West, he thinks. Someone, call it a deity, clicks on a light bulb above his head. In a whisk, King's hand snatches at a row of books above his battered desk and comes back with a thin volume. The peculiar name emblazoned on the spine reads, Yellow Back Radio Broke-Down. "Eureka!" King says. Across time and space - more space than time - a similar scenario is playing out as K.W. Jeter labors to invent the steampunk genre. The cosmos rattles with the sound of "Eurekas." The Loop Garoo Kid slashes his mighty whip into the cosmos and wrangles these ideas into one boiling, seething, verbs-that-haven't-been-invented-yet cauldron of HooDoo freakout. Thomas Jefferson sidles up to the audience, hands behind the back of his white tee with the Circle-A, his pink mohawk catching the overhead lights, his cancan dress swishing, his stiletto heels tapping, and says, "That Ishmael Reed is one fine cat. I'd let him lick the inside of my mouth." How can you argue with Thomas Jefferson?
Okay so how do this chronologically? Second book ; third book by Reed. But I read them the other way around and totally haven’t read the first. So let me say this from my point of view ; Yellow Back Radio Broke Down is a step back from Mumbo Jumbo. But said from Reed’s point of view, the third of his novels is a great funky step forward and up. Yellow Back Radio Broke Down (ween ourselves off of abbrv’s please?) is a cartoon work=up of what comes into cool with Mumbo Jumbo. But it’s all different. And that different thing is what is cool. It’s a cartoon western! And given as I am to quick associations and reading=lists, let’s put it right there where it belongs, alongside of that one from Coover and that one from Hawkes (who else?). But you know it’s almost too easy squeezy, doing the parodic vamp of the western which (right?) almost from the beginning began to self=parody it’s own already parodic bad self? Meanwhile, back at the ranch, Lonesome Cowboy Burt’s got a song for you.
Do You like book Yellow Back Radio Broke-Down (2000)?
If you're like me and you've always wondered what would've happened if William S. Burroughs had written "Blazing Saddles" look no further!Bloated, idiotic cowpokes blunder through a capitalistic Old West, fucking with kids and everyone's mojo by murdering circuses. Enter the Loop Garoo Kid, or whoever-he-is, whose voodoo cowboy bullshit magic takes on all the forces the hick morons can throw at him. Just weird and hilarious! I've encountered Reed through his poetry, but his fiction is even better, witty, often sparse and just down-home hellz-a-blazin' unrighteousness.
—J.M. Hushour
There's a lot of violence and sex in this that may out off some readers, but it's still a really interesting piece of fiction. One of the reviews on the back desrcibes it as if a bunch of kids got into a theater's prop and costume department and put on an impropmtu Western, and this does capture some of the fantastical, bizzare, and caricatured fun of the story. It is also an adult satire of the U.S. in the author's time anachronistically laid over the tropes of the Western genre. The style (sometimes minimal punctuation and complete lack of quotation marks) makes for a bit of a difficult read, but help throw the reader off balance enough to enjoy and engage with the the rest of what the author does.
—Joshua
